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A really great update for the Edge range - the upgrades needs to be thoroughly tested but there’s a lot of promise here.
PROS:
Beautiful screen
Impressive build
Massive battery
CONS:
Slight plastic feel
Set to be expensive
Hands on: Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge review
The Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is a phone that instantly impresses the second you pick it up, bringing with it a similar feeling the first time you fondled HTC’s One M8, one of the best-looking phones on the market.
Where the’normal’ Galaxy S7 is far too similar to the previous year’s model, the S7 Edge takes a surprisingly successful smartphone in the S6 Edge and adds in some decent changes to make it worthy of the upgrade.
The changes are almost entirely cosmetic( apart from some welcome changes to the camera and battery) - but given you’ll be using this phone tens, if not hundreds, of times a day, the way it feels in the hand is hugely important.
Samsung has priced the Galaxy S7 Edge at Rs 56, 900 in the Indian market.
Read our hands on Samsung Galaxy S7 review
The main difference is on the back of the phone. The Galaxy Note 5 was the first Samsung phone to use the new curved back, and that’s been improved on the S7 Edge. The result is a smart, glossy phone that sits in the hand like a polished pebble, begging you to spin it around and enjoy the lack of sharp edges that lived on the S6 Edge and S6 Edge+ .
The reason I’ve compared it to both of the above is that the S7 Edge sits somewhere in between them in terms of spec. The QHD Super AMOLED screen is back once again - not an upgrade, but then Samsung had already crammed in too many pixels, so the sharpness is excellent and capable of dealing of nearly any content on the web and rendering it well.
Check out our hands on and first impressions Galaxy S7 vide
But the screen has been extended to 5.5-inches, up from the 5.1-inch display on the smaller screen on the S6 Edge, and slightly under the 5.7-inch choice on the Edge+ . However, what’s impressive is Samsung has managed to make the new S7 Edge not feel much larger than the smaller of the two devices mentioned, despite the big increase in screen area.
Don’t go thinking that this is a small phone though, as it’s still rather large in the hand - we’re well into what would have been called a phablet just a couple of years ago, and given I’ve come to this right from using the Huawei Mate 8 for a couple of weeks( and could have tricked my hands into thinking massive phones are fine) there’s every chance you’ll pick it up and couldn’t conceive using it every day.
The screen is also worth talking about here - yes, it’s still the same curved display as last year, but the curves disappear further around the side of the S7 Edge, with less bezel to see, which gives an even more immersive feel to the phone than before.
The effect is the same as on the S6 Edge - it’s a nice novelty to have, and makes the phone look wonderful when sat on the side, but in reality doesn’t add a huge amount of functionality.
That said it seems enough people were impressed with last year’s model to want to buy it, so improving that element seems like a smart move.
Thankfully, Samsung’s not making a big deal of the edge display when the screen is turned off, as it was a completely useless feature of the S6 Edge - you needed to rub the screen almost erotically at the side when the screen was off, and hope that it might show the time and weather.
The edge display has been upgraded now though, with more features added to the interface to make it more useful.
You’ve now got double width information when swiping in from the side of the screen, giving you updates on your friends, football scores, news and even a compass and torch option as well. These features are coming to last year’s S6 Edge duo as well, so it’s not going to be a headline feature, but it’s easy to swipe into and adds to the sheen of the curved display.
Like the Galaxy S7, there’s another b